Netflix has been caught promoting a movie titled Cuties as a drama about an 11-year-old who “explores her femininity” through “twerking,” complete with a provocative poster.
This is the far-left streaming outlet’s third strike when it comes to sexualizing children.
This streaming site is home to Barack and Michelle Obama.
The movie — a Sundance darling, naturally — is a French title. Cuties is rated TV-MA, which means there is an 11-year-old character in a movie that is “usually not suitable for anyone under 17 years of age (18 in some cases). Content may contain strong coarse language, explicit (in some cases, pornographic) strong sexual content, nudity, or intense/graphic violence.”
According to the Daily Mail, the theatrical release earned an NC-17 rating, which means no children under 17 are allowed into the theater, even if accompanied by a parent.
NC-17 movies usually earn that rating for provocative sexual imagery.
The movie’s protagonist is 11-year-old Amy, a Senegalese Muslim girl who joins a dance group. She’s portrayed by Fathia Youssouf, who is 14 now and was likely 12 or 13 during filming.
According to one rave review:
The 11-year-old girls in Cuties—a French Netflix film that premiered at Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night—have a tentative grasp on the concept of sex. They theorize that oral sex involves a man’s penis filling up a woman’s entire body, and they know that condoms have something to do with AIDS, but they’re not quite sure what. But what they know with certainty is that sexuality is a girl’s key to attention and power. And they know that power is something they want.
It gets worse:
Amy [remember she’s only 11] impresses them with an audition. She has a secret weapon: A particularly risque dance move that involves humping the floor. Not even The Cuties have dared to be that sexual before.
But:
[The] script perfectly captures that preteen desperation to fit in, which so many girls understand to mean to “be sexy.” With the daily barrage of hypersexualized women in media, how can you blame them? Amy’s goal is not to have sex with men—again, she barely understands the mechanics of sex—it’s to win the approval of her classmates.
Fair enough…
The movie’s director, Maïmouna Doucouré, says the film is in fact a critique of the sexualization of children, specifically the Internet’s role in it. Not having seen the movie myself, I can’t comment either way. Cuties doesn’t stream on Netflix until next month.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of reason to ask whether Netflix’s intent was to sell this movie to the naked-under-the-raincoat crowd.
Netflix’s promotional poster features four prepubescent girls with bare midriffs in provocative poses wearing short shorts, which is something quite different from the original French poster.
Worse still, Netflix originally promoted the movie in the same way you would soft-core pornography. Get this: “Amy, 11, becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew. Hoping to join them, she starts to explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions.”
What type of animal wants to watch a movie about an 11-year-old — she’s eleven! — twerking and exploring her femininity?
Apparently, after an online uproar, Netflix changed the description to this — you’ll note how Netflix “owns” all us backwards “conservatives” who oppose child porn: “Eleven-year-old Amy starts to rebel against her conservative family’s traditions when she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited dance crew.”
You want to know what I believe in?
I believe in drawing lines.
I am not a scold. I am not a prude. I hate the cancel culture. The only strong feeling that bubbles up in me when it comes to what consenting adults do to one another at home or on the screen is indifference. But can we draw the line at children?
Can we draw the line at exploiting little girls — 11, 12, 13-year-old girls?
Can we draw the line at sexualizing children?
This didn’t sneak past someone at Netflix. Decisions were made. People with the power to decide decided to sell little girls, little prepubescent girls, like sex objects.
What are the rules, Hollywood? Objectification is wrong unless she’s eleven?
Oh, and this is not the first time Netflix has pimped little kids to the naked-under-the-raincoat crowd.
Remember Baby, the series that freakin’ glorified sex trafficking of 15-year-olds?
Then there was the movie Desire, which Netflix streamed even though it featured a scene where a pre-teen girl is depicted masturbating herself to orgasm.
“The camera even takes this scene into a close-up of the child’s face in slow motion, moving up and down and panting like a porn star. The scene is graphic and includes an orgasm,” PJ Media’s Megan Fox said describing the scene.
The director has defended himself by saying the actresses had no idea what they were doing was in a sexual context… but does that make it any better that he took footage of them doing something innocent and then made the viewer linger on that footage, made the viewer tie that footage to sex in the prologue of a movie that’s marketed as erotic and arousing? The suits at Netflix didn’t hesitate to license that?
Let me get this straight… The Woke Taliban force me to sit through a tutorial about what’s appropriate to laugh in Blazing Saddles, but soft core kiddie porn is a-okay with this crowd.
To be clear, I’m not commenting on the movie. Movies like Bully (2001), L.I.E. (2001), and others have successfully used teens and pre-teens to delve into mature themes. That might be true for Cuties. But don’t tell me the suits at Netflix aren’t playing it up with a cheap, exploitative strategy of LOOK AT THESE “CUTIES” TWERKING ON SEPTEMBER 9TH!!
This is what evil looks like.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.